Formats Gallery | Up, Down ’N All Around

Reddington Road to Vail

November 29, 2012
Glenn
1 Comment

This is what Arizona was supposed to look like. We were definitely in the desert now. Three foot (1 metre)-high fishhook cacti lined the trail, decorating yellow sandy grasslands as we hiked away from Reddington Road, the dirt track continuation of Tucson’s Tanque Verde (Green Tank) road, where a well-intentioned lady driver who had talked at us for the whole…
read more →

Summerhaven to Gordon Hirabayashi

November 25, 2012
fdevalera
1 Comment

Christmas came early this year. After a night's unconsciousness in the Apache Junction Best Western, we came around stiff and sore, our clothes and boots worn into holes, the boots, once our best friends, now offering about as much support as jelly to a spoon, our water reservoirs boasting cultures labs would die for, our hips resenting the loss of…
read more →

Roosevelt Lake to Roger’s Trough

November 23, 2012
fdevalera
2 Comments

We're looking forward to ecstatic recognition and applause from the international scientific community. Our research in the Superstition Wilderness has allowed us to establish with 100% certainty that the Superstition bees are irresistibly attracted to bright blue. Our methodical experiments with blue-zipped Zip Lock bags, the blue tubes on our water reservoirs, bright blue M & Ms and the TP's…
read more →

LF Ranch to Highway 87

November 12, 2012
fdevalera
1 Comment

In 5.5 days, we only saw 1 human being: I saw Glenn and Glenn saw me. For all we know, for most of that time we were the only humans in the 252,500 acres (1022 km2) Mazatzal Wilderness (Mazatzal meaning Land of Deer in Aztec, even though the Aztecs aren't supposed to have come this far north), especially given that…
read more →

Flagstaff to Mormon Lake: Back on the trail!

November 1, 2012
fdevalera
0 Comments

Not only are we back on the trail, but we've actually made good progress; unintentionally to some extent. With Glenn's shin splints driven into hiding, we stocked up with food, filled our bellies with copious Greek carbs and walked across the Flagstaff railway tracks to re-join the Arizona Trail. We agreed when we started the trail back in September to…
read more →

Sideways (Week 3: Hopi Mesas back to Flagstaff)

October 29, 2012
fdevalera
0 Comments

We decided to take the back, unsignposted and largely missing-from-the-map dirt track from the Hopi Mesas to Kayenta, the cheap place to stay if you're visiting Monument Valley, via Pinon (probably originally Piñón or "pine nut" in Spanish), crossing a small part of the Navajo Nation which few other whiteys visit. The track produced a lady with a pick-up full…
read more →

Sideways (Week 2: Winslow to the Hopi Mesas)

October 22, 2012
fdevalera
0 Comments

We propelled ourselves 20 miles back towards Flagstaff and 50,000 years into the past to visit Meteor Crater which, yes, is just a big hole in the ground, made by a fairly small meteorite which hit the earth at between 24,000 and 40,000 miles an hour, depending on which of the museum signs you choose to believe. Useless fact of…
read more →

Sideways (Week 1: Flagstaff to Winslow)

October 18, 2012
fdevalera
1 Comment

Well, at least we're not going backwards this time. Not quite, anyway. When we arrived in Flagstaff, bruising and pain down the front of Glenn's leg screamed "SHIN SPLINTS" (or a "hiccup in his giddy-up", as he calls it). Knowing from bitter personal experience that trying to tough them out just makes them braver, we decided to act grown up,…
read more →

Russell Tank to Flagstaff

October 7, 2012
fdevalera
4 Comments

Water, water and water. That was what we spent most of the seconds of the minutes of the hours of this part of the hike thinking about. We set out with a swimming pool worth of water: 15 litres - all we could physically carry. We thought we had it all worked out and some extra water to get us…
read more →

Backwards (Tusayan to Russell Tank)

October 1, 2012
fdevalera
0 Comments

Sometimes I guess you just have to go backwards to go forwards... We set out from Tusayan with 12 litres of (heavy!) water and 10 days' of dehydrated food. The first day took us through beautiful pine forests, past a pair of elk hunt scouts with an elk bugle and a hunter camp and landed us in a beautiful camping…
read more →